Blue Box Prospers under IBM Ownership at OpenStack Tokyo

Jesse Proudman of Blue Box discusses his company's new release and why IBM's ownership is pushing his company forward like never before.

IBM acquired privately-held managed OpenStack vendor Blue Box in June of this year. Now barely six months later, Blue Box is out with a new solution and the company's founder is aggressively hiring major talent in the OpenStack developer space. Proudman has managed to attract 55 people to help IBM build out its OpenStack cloud efforts.

In a video interview with ServerWatch at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Jesse Proudman, Distinguished Engineer and CTO at Blue Box, an IBM company, discusses his company's new release.

Surprisingly, the first Blue Box on-premises release does not yet use IBM hardware, though that's something that will likely change very soon.

"This initial release is based on Cisco UCS, still using Juniper firewalls, and we're using Ceph storage," Proudman said.

Blue Box has seen interest in deploying managed OpenStack on IBM's Power architecture as well. In fact, Proudman said that one of the deals Blue Box has closed for its local managed OpenStack offering has a Power component to it.

"The control plane and all the Blue Box technology is built on x86, and then the Power nodes slot in as part of the deployment," Proudman said.

The way the IBM Power systems work with Blue Box is by way of the PowerKVM hypervisor, with the Power boxes working as an OpenStack Nova compute target.

Overall, the promise of Blue Box's technology is that it makes OpenStack consumable for enterprises because it's all managed.

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